Hacking Happiness (10 page)

A final component to Lively is that friends and family members contribute to a physical book that is mailed to seniors living at home twice a week. It’s a literal facebook that adds to the emotional connection between generations.

The most powerful component of the platform, however, is the
improvement of relationships between parents and their adult children due to a lack of constant nagging. “This was an unintended consequence we learned during testing,” said Fanlo. “The seniors we asked were now happy to talk to their children. In the past, relationships had gotten toxic. The nagging was poisoning relationships. Since the children of seniors knew parent health was monitored, this took away the toxicity between the generations.”
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Along with Big Data, the trend or notion of Little Data has been growing in prominence. Outside of the technical aspects of sensors and tracking technology being inexpensive enough for the general public to take advantage of, Little Data also refers to the types of interactions involving platforms like Lively. Data is centered around one primary node (the seniors) and their actions (four or five activity streams). It’s intimate, contained, and highly effective at achieving a set goal to the benefit of multiple stakeholders.

Here’s another aspect of sensors to note in these examples: They’re invisible. Tracking doesn’t always have to be nefarious in nature. Lively calls their health monitoring “activity sharing.” For the next few years, we’ll be aware of sensors in the form of wearable devices because they’re new, much like we first felt about mobile phones when they were introduced. But after we become used to them, they’ll fade from prominence and do their passive collection while we go on with our lives.

Disaster Data

Patrick Meier is an internationally recognized thought leader on the application of new technologies for crisis early warning, humanitarian response, and resilience. He regularly updates his iRevolution blog, focusing on issues ranging from Big Data and cloud computing to crisis mapping and humanitarian-focused technology.

Recently, he blogged about the creation of an app that could be
utilized during crisis situations to immediately connect people in need to those who could provide assistance. During crises, it can take many hours or even days for outside assistance to come to the aid of a devastated community. Meier is working to create solutions that can empower communities to provide help to one another in the critical time frame occurring directly after a negative event.

In his post “MatchApp: Next Generation Disaster Response App?”
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Meier lays out the vision for an app using a combination of sensors that could help people both ask for and provide assistance during a crisis. (Note the image here is a mock-up; Meier also recently wrote
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about an existing app called Jointly that has created a similar framework.) The concept of the MatchApp idea is quite simple: Like a shifting jigsaw puzzle, people’s needs shift dramatically in real time in the wake of a crisis. But location, identified via GPS, plays a key role in helping match need with re
sources in the most streamlined way possible. The figure on the previous page shows how a specific need is being met via a combination of GPS (on the left) and a confirming text message (on the right).

Meier describes how privacy is maintained in this framework while also providing a vehicle for increasing digital trust:

Once a match is made, the two individuals in question receive an automated alert notifying them about the match. By default, both users’ identities and exact locations are kept confidential while they initiate contact via the app’s instant messaging (IM) feature. Each user can decide to reveal their identity/location at any time. The IM feature thus enables users to confirm that the match is indeed correct and/or still current. It is then up to the user
requesting help
to share her or his location if they feel comfortable doing so. Once the match has been responded to, the user who received help is invited to rate the individual who offered help.
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The app and scenario provide a compelling example of how implementing sensors can help improve our health and even save lives. By proactively implementing protected data plans as Meier has in the MatchApp, we also work around privacy concerns, as people’s preferences are taken into consideration and they’re provided the choice to reveal their information as they see fit.

Margaret Morris—Left to Our Own Devices

Margaret Morris is a clinical psychologist and senior researcher at Intel. She examines how people relate to technology, and creates mobile and social applications to invite self-awareness and change. In her TED Talk “The New Sharing of Emotions” (April 2013), she discusses her work of creating a “mood phone” with her research team at Intel. Designed to be a “psychoanalyst in your pocket,” her
tool lets people self-track moods and other behavior in experiments when they are “left to their own devices.” Morris’s logic is that, as our mobile phones are always at our side, we can leverage them for insights to improve our well-being. The bond that patients form with traditional therapy can extend to our phones for connection to social networks or other resources.

Here’s my favorite quote from her TED Talk: “We’re at this moment where we can enable all kinds of sharing by bringing together very intimate technologies like sensors with massive ones like the cloud. As we do this, we’ll witness new kinds of breakthough moments, and bring our thinking and all our approaches about emotional well-being into the twenty-first century.”
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I interviewed Morris to ask about the issues she brought up in her talk, to see how people relate to their smartphones, where the technological aspects are less important than the feeling of being helped by having an omnipresent, trusted tool at their side. A number of these issues are also elucidated in an excellent paper Morris wrote with a number of other researchers from Intel, Oregon Health and Sciences University, and Columbia University called
Mobile Therapy: Case Study Evaluations of a Cell Phone Application for Emotional Self-Awareness
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Can you describe your work with the “mood phone”? How did that work come about, and how has it evolved?

I created the mood phone to show how tools for emotional well-being (e.g., those from psychotherapy and mindfulness practices) could move into daily life, be available to everyone who has a phone, and be contextually relevant. It started as a complex system involving wireless sensing of ECG, calendar integration, and just-in-time prompting based on cognitive therapy, yoga, and mindfulness. It emerged because I was asked (within my research group) to develop a new approach to technologies for cardiovascular disease. It was important to me to take a preventive approach,
focusing on psychosocial risks, and make something that would be very desirable and improve quality of life immediately while lowering long-term risk. I was interested in emotional well-being and relationship enhancement as motivational hooks for self-care. They are more palpable than long-term cardiovascular risk, and of course, the quality of our relationships affects everything.

Where do you see the balance between human psychoanalysts and the ones “in your pocket”? How can people determine that balance?

Most people do not have access to terribly good mental health care of any sort, much less psychoanalysis. They are “left to their own devices” and are remarkably resourceful, learning from friends, strangers, and using everything at their disposal, including their devices, apps, social media, and their own data.
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I think this last point is really important when considering why technology can be utilized to improve our well-being, whether it’s mentally, physically, or emotionally focused. While it’s understandable people would be concerned about replacing a human therapist with technology, it also doesn’t make sense to ignore a tool we all have with us all the time that could help us examine and improve our well-being. Our mobile phones also provide us direct, real-time contact with our loved ones or people responsible for our care. Whether they provide aid in emergency situations or simply a reminder that people in our lives are looking out for us, it’s also relevant to ask why we feel comfortable allowing these tools to track our behavior for marketing purposes, but get leery of using them to measure our emotions directly. Advertisers have no compunction about analyzing every decision, interaction, word, and action you take to get insights about the perfect timing to introduce their products or services. Why not utilize these same methodologies to understand your emotions in a personal context?

A final word on this idea that Morris mentions in her TED Talk. When her first experiment was done with the mood phone, she thought a lot of participants might have concerns about their privacy—how their data was being used, and so on. But what she heard most often was people asking if they could get the technology for their spouses. The insights the tools generated about their emotional lives led many of them to believe that their relationships would be greatly improved if they could take those insights and share them with the ones they love most. Elements of their personalities revealed by the technology created opportunities for discussions infused with an objectivity that wasn’t available before the mood phone was put to use.

So my final question here would be, would you rather be “left to your own device” or continue to do your best on your own?

The H(app)athon Project

There’s a growing movement to standardize the metrics around well-being that can lead to happiness. The combination of Big Data, your social graph, and artificial intelligence means everyone will soon be able to measure individual progress toward well-being, set against the backdrop of all humanity’s pursuit to do the same. In the near future, our virtual identity will be easily visible by emerging technology like Google’s Project Glass and our actions will be just as trackable as our influence. We have two choices in this virtual arena: Work to increase the well-being of others and the world, or create a hierarchy of influence based largely on popularity.
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—JOHN C. HAVENS

I wrote this article four months before I founded the H(app)athon Project. The piece was the inspiration for this book and the project I’m focusing on full-time. I believe mobile technology, utilizing sensors, will transform the world for good if personal data is managed effectively and people utilize these tools however works best for
them. I’m writing this not to pitch you on the Project (although we are a nonprofit and all of our tools are free anyway, so of course I’d love for you to check it out), but because I want to be accountable to you as a writer. I love researching and writing, I love interviewing experts and providing a unique perspective. But I also believe taking action based on your passions is of paramount importance to best encourage others. That way, expertise is tempered and shaped by experience.

I was recently interviewed by the good folks at Sustainable Brands about our Project, as I spoke at their upcoming conference. Here is a description of the H(app)athon Project as I related it to author Bart King:

Our vision is that mobile sensors and other technologies should be utilized to identify what brings people meaning in their lives. We’ve created a survey that’s complemented by tools that track action and behavior in a private data environment. By analyzing a person’s answers and data, we create their personal happiness indicator (PHI) score, a representation of their core strengths versus a numbered metric.

A person can then be matched to organizations that reflect their PHI score in a form of data-driven micro-volunteerism. There’s a great deal of science documenting that action and altruism increase happiness. So we’re simply identifying where people already find meaning and help them find ways to get happier while helping others. At scale, we feel this is the way we save the world.

At the moment, we’re just beginning our work. Our survey can be taken online and on iPhones, but we’re seeking funding to build out the sensor portion of our data collection. We’ve partnered with the City of Somerville, MA, to pilot our proof-of-concept model over the next ten months.
Somerville is the only American city to implement Happiness Indicator metrics with a sitting government. Our hope is that by adding sensor data into the mix we can gain critical insights to help with transparent city planning that improves citizens’ well-being.
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I want to make it clear how important Hacking H(app)iness is to my life in the form of this book and the H(app)athon Project. The technology of sensors provides a way to reveal aspects of ourselves we may not see. In the same way that you achieve catharsis watching a play where actors exhibit emotion you may not always be able to reveal, sensors give you permission to act on the data driving your life.